Notorious “American Taliban” John Philip Lindh, 38 years of age, is free today. The prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where he spent the last 17 years, released Lindh.
HE’S STILL A JIHADIST
He has not reformed ideologically and is getting three years off his twenty-year sentence for good behavior because the judicial system treats him as a common felon. Lindh has not renounced global jihad.
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What should alarm Americans is there is a whole slew of these guys due to get out in a few years and we have no formal policy for dealing with them.
“We are in prison due to our beliefs and the practice of our religion, not for committing any crime,” Lindh wrote in a March 2014 letter.
ISIS IS “DOING A SPECTACULAR JOB”
He was asked whether the militant group ISIS represented Islam.
“Yes, and they are doing a spectacular job,” he wrote in February 2015, going on to say he supports their efforts. “The Islamic State is clearly very sincere and serious about fulfilling the long-neglected religious obligation of establishing a caliphate through armed struggle, which is the only correct method.”
That was right after Americans were beheaded.
“The Islamic State is clearly very sincere and serious about fulfilling the long-neglected religious obligation to establish a caliphate through armed struggle, which is the only correct method,” Lindh wrote in a 2015 letter from prison to NBC’s KNBC in Los Angeles.
His correspondence with journalists and other comments in prison were part of the basis for a 2016 U.S. intelligence document from the National Counter Terrorism Center that said Lindh continued to “advocate for global jihad.”
HE LIES
Lindh said when he was sentenced in 2002, he did not support terrorism and that he made a “mistake by joining the Taliban.” Lindh added, “I have never understood jihad to mean anti-Americanism or terrorism. I condemn terrorism on every level, unequivocally.”
But in his correspondence to the LA station, he expressed vastly different sentiments, saying he was proud “to take part in the Afghan jihad,” according to NBC News. In his letters, he signed his name as Yahya.
Lindh was captured fighting with the Afghan Taliban shortly after the 9/11 attacks and was responsible for the death of CIA officer Michael Spann. Mike Spann was killed in Afghanistan during an uprising of Taliban prisoners, including Lindh. Spann had interrogated Lindh shortly before the attack. Lindh was never tried in Spann’s death. Spann’s daughter Alison Spann has condemned the release of this still very dangerous man.
His probation includes restrictions: He needs permission to go on the Internet; he’ll be closely monitored; he’s required to receive counseling; and he’s not allowed to travel.
LINDH HAD A PRIVILEGED UPBRINGING
Lindh’s father worked for the Justice Department and moved to a tony Marin County neighborhood when he was 10. He was raised Catholic but converted to Islam at 16 after seeing the movie ‘Malcolm X.’
With support from his parents, he traveled to Yemen to study Islam and Arabic and then went on to Pakistan in 2000. The following year, he crossed the border to Afghanistan to volunteer as a Taliban soldier.
“Here’s where John starts to get himself in trouble,” Frank Lindh said in 2013. “It never crossed our mind that he would go into Afghanistan, but that’s what he did in spring of 2001.”
In the summer of 2001, Lindh was at a Taliban training camp when al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden visited. The Taliban sent Lindh to the far northeast of the country shortly before al-Qaida’s Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. He remained with the Taliban until a group of several hundred surrendered near the end of November.
SOME DEMOCRATS WANT YOU TO THINK HE’S A REPUBLICAN
Some of the left-wing is trying to pawn this lunatic off as a right-winger. Democrats accuse everyone on the right of being haters, so it’s easy for them to make the jump.
In his book, American Taliban; How War, Sex, Sin, and Power Bind Jihadists and the Radical Right, author Markos Moulitsas draws comparisons between the Taliban and the so-called Radical Right (like the innocent Tea Party).
Moulitsas says, “In their tactics and on the issues, our homegrown American Taliban are almost indistinguishable from the Afghan Taliban.”
Referring to the right as the “American Taliban,” Markos points to the right’s faith in masculinity, disdain for women’s rights, hatred of gays, aversion to science and modernity and stanch anti-intellectualism to buttress his claim that America has its very brand of homegrown Taliban.
That’s ironic. The party that denies biology and wants to bring us back to an ideology that caused the death of 100 million people in the last century is simply projecting. There is no more anti-intellectualism, disdain for women’s right or hatred of gays on the right than there is on the left. The hate we see today seems to come from the left.
In one chapter of his book, Moulitsas says, “If the American Taliban and their ideological cousins on the other side of the world can agree on one thing, it’s that culturally, America is going to hell. From sex, drugs, and rock and roll, to movies and TV, to growing secularism, they both have a genuine sense of shared revulsion at the notion of a permissive, free society.”
Freedom shouldn’t mean anarchy, which is what this stereotyping author wants.
